In 2021, I hit a breaking point. I was tired of working sales jobs, chasing money and feeling that none of it mattered. I wanted to do something genuinely good, something difficult that I thought might actually help people.

I found what I thought was my answer through a temp agency listing for a night-shift position at a downtown Los Angeles homeless shelter.

Politically, I was ready for it. I had recently paid $40 to hear Bernie Sanders speak in Glendale and bought his book “It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism.” I believed that the suffering on Los Angeles streets was the inevitable result of corporate greed.

A society wealthy enough to produce billionaires, yet willing to tolerate Skid Row five miles away, seemed morally bankrupt. Tax the rich, redistribute the money and everyone could live with dignity — it seemed obvious.

Shortly before I had begun my new position, I attended a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) meeting. The politics were more extreme than mine, but the people seemed compassionate. After the meeting, I found the host standing beside his bicycle lock, which had been cut in half. His bike was gone. I offered him a ride home and he accepted.

In the car, he told me that it was unfortunate that our capitalist system forced people to steal like this. I was impressed by his grace.

I arrived for my first shift at the homeless shelter near MacArthur Park, home to one of the city’s most accessible open-air drug markets. It was a scene of despair: People hunched over on fentanyl, lying on the ground seemingly unconscious or huddling in groups to buy and sell drugs. Others sold stolen goods from local stores to pay for their next high. If you showed MacArthur Park to people from Europe or Asia, they would never believe it was part of the glamorous culture capital they hear so much about.

Each evening, a van delivered 70 packaged meals, and about half were usually eaten. I was instructed to throw away the rest.

It was when I was disposing of freshly made meals that had just been delivered in Styrofoam clamshells that I began thinking about all the money. The city was not withholding any resources. It was spending enormous sums, visibly and constantly. Yet the people inside the shelter didn’t seem to be moving toward stability.

Once, a resident showed me an expensive specialized electric bicycle. A nerd for e-bikes, I was familiar with the model and knew that it cost thousands of dollars. When I asked where it came from, she casually described traveling with other residents to the West Side to steal bicycles. Buyers sometimes met her outside the shelter.

The shelter, it turned out, had a full-scale theft ring operating inside it.

I did, of course, meet some wonderful people with brutal backstories who could not find a path back into society. But the situation in Los Angeles felt close to impossible for someone like that. How could you rejoin society and qualify for a lease on a new apartment, let alone pass a background and credit check?

I tried voicing my concerns during a meeting with senior management. I heard the familiar language of victimhood and systemic injustice. I heard much less about stopping the drug dealers at our gate, preventing clients from using drugs inside, treating severe mental illness or moving residents toward independence.

I also happened to know that these nonprofit managers made great salaries while not even coming into the shelter.

After watching this endless incineration of tax dollars, I concluded that the problem was not a lack of compassion or money. I came to see the shelter as part of a calculated system disguised as a compassionate philosophy.

It made me sick. We were not helping. We were sustaining an epidemic of suffering.

I have not and will not stop caring about the poor. My faith does not permit that. I still believe that a decent society has obligations to the hungry, the mentally ill and people sleeping outside.

But those obligations include telling the truth about what is destroying them and, at times, forcing them to change.

That is what you do for someone you love. If someone is hurting himself and others, you intervene. You do not hand them their favorite poison and look away. That is what too many of our local governments have done.

I entered that shelter believing that my fellow leftists had a monopoly on compassion. I departed understanding that compassion without order and accountability is deeply unserious.

We all know the old saying about hell and good intentions. Working the night shift at a downtown LA homeless shelter has given it fresh resonance for me.

Lee Kuan Yimby is the pseudonym of a writer based in Philadelphia. This is a shortened version of an article that was first published at City Journal.

Download The California Post App, follow us on social, and subscribe to our newsletters